The EMPATHI Framework for Clean Energy Impact Assessment: Technical Reference

This document is the methodology of record for EMPATHI, Energy Metrics for Project Assessment of Trade-offs and Human Impacts, a framework that translates a user defined electricity sector intervention into projected avoided emissions and the downstream climate, public health, and ecological outcomes that follow from them. The framework covers thirteen technology options across 53 United States jurisdictions, with twelve emissions projection schemes and five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. It integrates EPA AVERT, NREL Cambium, EPA eGRID, and EPA COBRA derived health relationships resolved to the jurisdiction in which the emission change occurs, and it reconstructs the DICE-EMR mortality cost of carbon (MCC) to enable scenario dependence, project scale evaluation, and extend it to the mortality costs of methane and nitrous oxide. Insights into what building the project costs are presented with water withdrawal and consumption, land or seabed occupation, lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions, the bird and bat impact, and the prior land cover of the photovoltaic fleet a solar project joins. Regional temperature scaling from the Sixth Assessment Report climate reference regions translates the global response down to each jurisdiction, supporting estimates of avoided exposure to hot, wet and dry extremes, hydroclimate whiplash, area burned and extreme daily fire growth in California, and mortality from wildfire smoke. A cost module expresses those outcomes per dollar of intervention. This reference documents the data sources, governing equations, parameters, validation, and limitations of each module integrated in EMPATHI.